Musings of a Microstrab

I rode the train east again this August.  Like last year, I took Amtrak’s Empire Builder from Portland to Chicago.  It takes 44 hours and goes right by Glacier Park in Montana. Last year we picked up a carload of Mennonites, with their solar-powered cell phone chargers.  This year, we picked up an equal number of Girl Scouts.  I didn’t take their picture, but I got one of this rainbow just east of Whitefish:

Riding across country in coach class on Amtrak is interesting. On one hand, I had two seats to myself until we got to Minneapolis, and they are the size of first class seats on an airplane.  On the other hand, I couldn’t shower for two days.  And there is always the chance you’ll run into Satanic conductors, as the signs warn:

I spent two days in Chicago where I got to eat at the famous Chicago (Vegetarian) Diner and the less-famous biker hangout, Handlebar.  The former place had more for me to eat, but I liked the bicycle place for it’s al fresca food. I didn’t get a good picture, but I found one:

I was in Chicago for my annual lazy eye meeting on the first. I managed to persuade them to put me up in a LEED-certified green hotel room at the Hilton, with hardwood (or was it Pergo?) floors and blinds, not curtains. It even had a water filter on the shower head and an air filter instead of conditioner.  I hope I wasn’t smelling ozone.

The LEED room couldn’t have been more different from the Best Western in Annapolis where I spent Saturday night.  I flew there to attend my last Grandma’s memorial service, only nine months after her demise.  She wanted her ashes scattered on the Chesapeake Bay.  That’s her drifting out to sea in her biodegradable Mulberry container, above.  But her eight kids couldn’t agree on a date — until now.  Lucikly, my Aunt Dorinda from Georgia and my Dad from Pennsylvania were able to bring 7 of the 8 surviving children together this day.

After returning my rental PT Cruiser (which got an impressive 10 miles to the gallon) at the airport, Dad drove me back to my home state where I got to see Grandpa Joe. He’s going on 86 now, and still a volunteer for the VA Hospital, for whom he drives a very patriotic-looking van for disabled veterans:

Visiting McAdoo, PA is always restful but sobering.  This time, I had several duties to which I had to attend. First, Grandpa had wrist surgery on Wednesday to resolve the numbness in his right hand after a fall on the ice last winter.  I also had to pack the last of my things for shipping to PA.  Those shipping pods sure are fun!

Still, I liked staying on the second-story screen porch after the Maryland smokey one. Pennsylvania has even outlawed smoking in restaurants, almost a year ahead of Oregon. These are the things you think about when taking evening walks through the cemetery. Sometimes I visit the grave of an unrelated Slovak.  His name could be my own, as Metro (pronounced MEE-tro) isn’t short for metrosexual, but Dimitri, which is the equivalent of James in Eastern Europe.

As is always the case, my trip back east was a bittersweet one, but on the bright side, I didn’t skin my hands and my knee like I did during the scavenger hunt in Portland.  That’s what I get for buying my first beer in twenty years, even if it was a bribe for Stu.  It’s also just deserts for carrying a 20-ounce glass bottle and trying to text at the same time.

Until next year, then, I will keep the image of the clothesline I saw from my screen porch in my mind for the rainy winter here in the Pacific Northwest.

I grew up in a Pennsylvania coal town. People there are poor, but generous. My Grandpa Joe still lives there, along with three of his four living siblings.

Since I didn’t visit with family last Christmas, we arranged to see each other for Grandpa Joe’s 85th birthday this month.  It was my sister’s idea.  Heather agreed to come in from Minnetonka, and Mom from Hot Springs, NC, just for the occasion. Catering will be compliments of the Grand China Buffet in snow-capped Hazleton, PA. I couldn’t take the train this time, as Amtrak no longer goes to my hometown. They even demolished the Victorian train station.

 Now Grandpa Joe has downsized his living space since I was last there.  He’s now renting out the big house and living in the little one on the back lot that he built for his mother. Yes, Grandpa built a whole house. Except for setting the foundation, he laid all the cinderblock and tile, framed and roofed it, put in all the plumbing and electrical wiring, windows, doors, and floors.  And he did it all after work at night, using electric lights and keeping the neighbors awake with the sound of hammering and sawing.  I guess that was OK, because they are all Eastern Orthodox Catholics, and used to things like midnight mass.

 Talk about making your bed and having to lie in it — Grandpa did. But I don’t think he knew he’d be living in the house when he build it. Grandma Osifat lived there for almost the entire 38 years she was a widow.  My Grandpa’s kid sister, Aunt Mary Ann, lived there for a while too, since she was only 4 when my own mother was born.  Grandpa was the oldest of seven, after all. I expect to see three of his four living sisters at his birthday party on Saturday. Aunt Mary Ann will be there with my Uncle Jimmy Scarpati, the barber who gave me my first haircut.

It’s really remarkable when you consider the money used to pay for the little 2-bedroom house above the 2-car garage was from the U.S. Calvary. Seems my Great-Grandma’s borther, George, was training for WW I in Texas when he was crushed by a horse. The death benefit was $10K, a fortune in those days.But late, great-uncle George’s gypsy parents believed it to be blood money, and wouldn’t spend it. They wouldn’t keep in in the bank, either. The story goes that great-great-grandpa Pscholyar (seated, third from left, with his son George standing behind) kept the money under his bed in a box, and counted it every day.

There’s not much room for Grandpa Joe, me, my sister, mom and stepdad in the little house. Since I’m the youngest, I’ll be sleeping down in the furnace and laundry room. At least it’s heated down there against the coal mountain winter winds. Also, I’ll have the company of the picture of my late, great-great-uncle, George, in his military uniform. The cloth star that he wore as a calvary private in basic training is underneath the glass, in the house built with the money from his senseless and tragic death. 

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The Meet in Minneapolis folks don’t like to be inside during the summer, which is essentially the month of August. I’m told they spend all waking hours on one of their lakes. Why, I’ll never know, since I get motion sick just looking at the water. But since it was raining on this Saturday night, we had a respectable showing at Elsie’s for cosmic bowling.

The music was bad, but the blacklights were good. For example, did you know that tonic water fluoresces? Imagine what the retinal vaculature must look like after downing this drink:

My sister Heather wasn’t sure she was good enough, but she was as good (or bad) as I was. Clearly the rest of the Minnesota gang spends all winter bowling, judging from their scores compared with ours.

We had a good time in any case, and I hope to return to sing karaoke with the shy and modest Meet in MLPS folks soon. Then we’ll teach them that if they ain’t got Mojo Nixon, then their state could use some fixin’.

I love my Grandpa Joe, but he can be a real pistol when it comes to sleeping in. I’m going to rant about it now.

Like the time when I invited Grandpa to a Fourth of July picnic in Wind Gap, PA, and he got confused and showed up at my house in Nazareth. Something like 4 hours later I went looking for him to find Grandpa pounding on the doors and trying to break in to the house.

Seems he saw the air coniditioners were on, and decided since no sane person leaves the air conditioners on when they are not home, I must be asleep upstairs. Never mind that it was 100 degrees, humid, and I have a brick house. As it is his job to wake up all sleeping people when he is awake, he was attempting to do so for something like 6 hours (since he arrived before he said he was leaving, as usual).

To be fair, my car was parked out front, as I got a ride to the picnic. But you’d think after an hour or two, either Grandpa would’ve called, driven the six miles to Wind Gap, or the Nazareth police would’ve arrested him. Of course, he didn’t have his Trac phone that day. You can’t write this all off to senility. He’s not, and it was years ago now.

But that’s not the only time Grandpa decided to make a citizen’s arrest for somebody sleeping.

Once, when I was staying with my grandparents and working at their eye doctor’s office, and it was closed for Columbus Day, Grandpa did the same damned thing, even when I told him the night before that I could sleep in. It’s 6 AM, and I went to bed late. It’s not even like Grandpa calls me nicely — he bangs on the door with his fist, nearly giving me heart failure.

The next time Grandpa promises not to wake me up, I’m going to get him to sign an affadavit the night before and tape it to my door, I swear. If I needed your help getting up, Grandpa, I wouldn’t have been able to commute to New York City from PA for a whole year while I was a resident, getting up at 4:30 every day all by myself. And did you know I have been hauling myself out of bed at 5 AM every stinking day to commute from Portland to Forest Grove this past year?

Dear Grandpa, please take note that I only get to sleep in on vacation. I’ve been arising hours before you awoke several times on this one. But please, the one day I have to drive until 11 at night from Minneapolis to Chicago, don’t get me up before dawn, insist on driving right into Chicago weekend traffic because you left the atlas I got you the last time we came to visit who-knows-where, and then go to sleep as soon as it gets dark, leaving me to drive exhausted and hallucinating.

Still, if I’m ever woken by Grandpa again, I think I’ll go postal. Rant over. I do love the old guy. Really I do.

My sister and I went to Banana Republic yesterday. I don’t normally frequent malls, but Heather makes it a habit to try to get me into cool clothes whenever she’s with me. She’s always looking good. So while she’s trying on this black dress, I find a green jacket on sale.

Now, maybe you’ve seen my green Gap jacket I wear most of the year — I think I’m wearing it on my bike in one of my profile pics. Anyway, it got a little damaged in my bike accident in April. You know, the one that has me wearing those silly gloves all the time? The jacket is not great to wear to work now, and was from Goodwill anyway.

So I find this cotton replacement, just my size, on the sale rack. Only thing is, though it’s not listed on the label, it looks to me the snaps are reinforced with little leather circles on the inside. That’s right, LEATHER. And I’m supposed to be some kind of ethical vegan, avoiding animal products for world hunger and environmental, if not self-righteous, reasons. So if someone sees these little tell-tale tan circles in the vegan’s coat, I’ll never live it down. And they’d be right, even if it’s inconsequential, I shouldn’t be a hypocrite.

But I’m not sure, or I don’t want to believe, about the leather. Soon a salesperson descends on me, I ask, and the chaos ensues. I learn later that none of this is motivated by comission, as Banana Republic apparently doesn’t have it.

Instead, it seems that here in Minnetonka, vegans are revered, so before I know I have just about the whole store staff examining the jacket and calling corporate HQ to find out the truth. Finally, the youngest clerk (with the youngest eyes and nose, for sniffing) agreed with me that the coat wasn’t vegan, but whispered conspiratorily that “it’s not very good leather.”

I’m thinking that’s not the point, but by now I’m not sure what the point is anyway. I mean, I’ve been vegan for 18 years, the only one in my family, but this doesn’t stop my sister from calling her husband up on the cell phone to make fun of me.

So what did the pure-at-heart straight-edge vegan do? I bought the damned coat, and will remove the leather (all seven little ciricles) so that maybe I won’t go to the deepest levels of Hell when I die in a train wreck someday soon, for my sins. I know, not purchasing and creating demand for leather is the point. But destroying the evidence is the next best thing. Isn’t it?

So this is it — the big day. After a leisurely Easter brunch with fifty or so of my closest friends, it’s time to give the Maxsight lenses a road test. Not a short hop (pun intended) from the MAX this time. Not a sheltered ride on the no-motor-vehicles Esplanade. This is a bike ride on the road, with 150 other bikers, none of them in Spandex either. How would my lenses stack up?

I almost forgot to put them in. Five minutes before I was supposed to leave, I remembered them. Holy crap! I ran to the medicine chest, got the lenses out, stared at them for a second and realized there was no help for me this time. No bench I could sit on by the Wilamette, no Proparicaine, no friends to help me. So in desperation, I did what I had to do — I put the lenses in my eyes. For the first and only time in ten years, I did it myself! Then I hopped (there it is again) on my Bianchi and took for for the starting line.

Just as the Forest Grove study participants were preparing to bike around Hagg Lake, the bunnies were gathering in Oregon Park. OK, they were people dressed like bunnies. One was even in full Frank the Rabbit from Donnie Darko. I thought about getting that costume myself, but I was worried about the fur getting caught in my spokes, or getting run over because of no peripheral vision.

The 4th Annual Bunny on a Bike Ride on Easter Sunday was organized by Carye Bye of Red Bat Press, whatever that is. We bunnies gathered at Oregon Park, near Glisan and 28th, multiplying each minute. At 3 PM, with the rain starting to fall, we headed out on a 2-hour loop through Laurelhurst Park, a Parade down Belmont , a voodoo donut, a piece of rhubarb pie and a hot drink at the Hawthorne Hostel and a spin around Ladd’s Circle.

And round. And round again while the bike-trailer mounted boombox played the Talking Heads and other Easter-appropriate music. And finally, back to Oregon Park. That’s me in the teal jacket (throughout the story).

We ended the ride with vegan Voodoo Doughnuts at the Hawthorne Youth Hostel. No one could see my lenses through the plano rainshields, but I found they made even the coldest, wettest ride more fun. The bottom line is they make me happy. I think the tint affects your mood. I will continue to wear them until the wear out, then get some more — now that I can get them in myself!

Stay tuned for future, unrelated musings of this microstrab.

On Saturday, I was prepared to ride the Esplanade near the east bank of the Wilamette. It was particularly rainy, and I had little waterproof clothing, but I was determined to go with some friends. This is especially true because I wanted to see how the amber Maxsight lenses would perform on a typical Oregon spring day — that is, one with no sun. Does the sun come out other places in March? Not here.

But there was one problem — I need numbing drops to get these flimsy Maxsight contacts into my blinky eyes, and I didn’t have any. Funny, I don’t have that problem with my Purevision Torics. Since the water content in these two lens materials is about the same, I’m guessing the difference is the modulus, with Purevision lenses are much easier to handle. B&L should look into silicon hydrogel tinted lenses for sports for this reason — but I digress.

After struggling with the Maxsight lenses for a good half an hour without getting even one lens in, I decided to take them with me to the Esplanade. Perhaps a friend could help me get them in while we waited for the others.

It’s not easy to perform contact lens insertion and removal on a floating boardwalk. The rain was falling, and wind was beginning to pick up. But that didn’t stop me from soliciting the help of a fellow contact-lens wearer, who was willing to wash their hands and try to forcibly apply the contacts while I held my esotropic eyes as wide open as possible. And that’s not very wide.

It’s funny to sit on a bench by the sewage-contaminated Wilamette with the rain falling in my eyes while I stared at the gray sky. But if you keep the wind from blowing your contacts off your finger and into the river, you can do it. And we did. The lenses only blew off once or twice. Luckily, they stuck to my coat both times.

Again, don’t try this at home.

Amazingly, the contact lenses felt better than they did on Thursday when I used the proparicaine method or insertion. Funny how having an intact cornea will increase comfort. Topped off with the plano protective glasses (provided by the contact lens study) and their significant wrap, I was ready for a long ride in the rain.

On the north end, the Eastbank Esplanade begins at the Steel Bridge, and continues past the Burnside and Hawthorne bridges to OMSI, the Oaks Bottom Wildlife refuge, and eventually to Sellwood where you can get hot drinks and warm up. So we rode south with our mind on our coffee and our coffee on our minds.

My amber lenses performed at least as well in the rain as they did at dusk last Thursday. The first thing I noticed was the blossoming cherry trees on the west bank of the river. So I was seeing certain colors better, like pink. But I was also seeing far away, even without my astigmatism correction (which is not currently available in Maxsight tints).

We rode down to Sellwood and back up the west bank without incident. The rain lightened up a bit, but regardless, the plano protective glasses that came with the Maxsight lenses kept the water out of my eyes. And the amber tint seemed to make this very gray day brighter. I think it has as positive an effect on your mood as it does on your sight.

I will try these lenses while biking at least one more time, on Easter Sunday afternoon in Northeast Portland.

I really shouldn’t wear contacts. I am such a strong reflex blinker that I usually require topical anesthetic to get them in my eyes. Thursday was no exception.

That’s when I was fit with amber Maxsight lenses for the bicycling and vision study at Pacific. I don’t think our third-year student, John, was expecting we’d need pharmaceutical agents. His classmate Erika looked on in amusement as I attempted to pry my own eyelids open and shove the little orange membranes in, before using the drops.

Don’t try this at home. Although the students did not stand in the way of their professor in this unadvisable endeavor, they should have. Proparicaine may be an acceptable way to acclimate yourself to rigid contacts, but then again, RGP’s don’t absorb medicine and hold it in contact with your cornea for hours and hours.

But corneas heal, and the Maxsight lenses were worth it. I wore them to the Curriculum Committee just to see Dr. London’s reaction. He said he couldn’t look at me because it reminded him of someone from the sixties B-movie “Village of the Damned.”

On the way back to Portland, I got a similar reaciton from fellow passengers on the MAX. Most people generally don’t like to sit next to someone with an orange ring around their irides.

But I must say, the cherry blossoms around the Wilamette were especially striking in the evening sun while wearing the Maxsight lenses. I got off the train just in time to ride by bike at dusk. The lenses did make car headlights look yellow, and this xanthopsia had not faded hours after I put the lenses in.

I rode home safely, noticing details along the way that I normally would have missed. The first buds of green leaves on trees and bushes were almost distractingly obvious. I wonder why I hadn’t noticed them earlier? I will have to try the lenses again on Saturday when I ride to Sellwood on the Esplanade.

I’d better get some more proparicaine.