EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX…OR DIDN’T

 As a writer and long-time journalist, I’m one of those guys who, when faced with a hole in my knowledge, I try to find out everything I can to squelch my ignorance. That means I spend an inordinate amount of time digging around in reference material of all sorts. It also means I used to squander many an hour in libraries or rooting around in whatever musty reference books and sundry printed materials I could lay hands on. But that was admittedly a restrictive activity, simply because, back then, learning everything you always wanted to know about a random topic could have ended up consuming most of the rest of your adult life, to the detriment of all the other random topics of which you might have hoped to glean a measure of knowledge.

Still, it had the virtue of one’s having to exert tremendous effort in the search for knowledge (meaning objective facts), which made you appreciate it all the more once you had it. And it also meant you would probably remember it a lot longer than today, precisely because of the effort you had to make.

In recent years—since the nineties, which, to someone like me, born slightly less than halfway through the previous century, seems like “only yesterday”—I’ve learned a whole new way to do research. Despite being rather an “old dog” by the time the Internet appeared on the scene, I didn’t consider myself above learning new tricks. And almost by accident, I found myself being something of a pioneer, within my limited circle, of the “working at home” culture of the Internet Era.

I’ve been doing precisely that since 1995, when dial-up Internet connections first appeared in Patagonia, a region to which I had moved less than two years before that. In doing so, I came face to face with a self-fulfilling prophecy that I myself had made nearly a decade before, when, writing a communications sidebar to a cover story that Apertura magazine of Buenos Aires published on “The Future”, I said that, in the not so distant future, guys like me, who made their living researching and writing, would be able to do both from the comfort of their own home, even if they lived in a cabin, in the middle of the mountains, in one of the most remote places on earth.

At the time I wrote it, I still lived in a mid-town apartment in Buenos Aires, and it had seemed like a pipe-dream. I mean, I didn’t doubt that it would happen eventually—just not in my lifetime. But suddenly, there I was, a decade later, in my mid-forties, in my Internet-based studio—in a cabin, in the middle of the mountains, in the remote Argentine Patagonia—researching, writing and translating for a variety of clients scattered everywhere from Buenos Aires to Miami, from Madrid to New York, and from Houston to Patagonia. And although, in the beginning, even people in the US had qualms about doing business through the World Wide Web, I hung in there and convinced them there was no need for my presence in big-city offices, or for material to travel by snail mail, or for us to use faxes and teletypes when the Internet could do it all.

What it meant for me personally, was that I had gone from being a stodgy old-school newsman whose manual typewriter they had practically had to pry out of my cold, dead hands, to being among the earliest advocates of the Internet, as much more than a clever novelty—as, indeed, an incredibly useful tool for communication and research.

I was just thinking about that again today when, in some reading I was doing, I came across some information about a French actress who said she identified as “sapiosexual”.  Well, I was stumped. I mean, although I am a very open-minded and liberal person, as someone who grew up in rural Ohio in an era when sexual orientations were obtusely considered to be two—please check one box only, M or F—and anyone who complained about it was sent to therapy, if not to jail, I’ve had to practice to be able to memorize and pronounce the initials LGBTQ. And while I’m a great believer in people doing whatever they want to with their bodies, and particularly with their genitalia, as long as their partners are willing, as long as there’s no pedophilia or unwilling subjugation involved, and as long as I don’t have to watch, it’s okay with me—although watching’s okay too, if that’s what turns you on—I have to admit that a lot of definitions of distinct sexualities have escaped me entirely.

Indeed, I had no idea how many were escaping me until I decided to quickly research sapiosexuality. Looking the term up, I immediately came up with numerous explanations. The best definition was, in short, being sexually or erotically aroused by intelligence, no matter what the physical sex of the other person was. I actually found that a pretty cool idea. A sort of highly cultivated sexual orientation. I mean, I’m far too intellectually inferior and hopelessly hetero for it to be an appealing idea to me personally, but I thought, hey, good for them, these “sapios”! Brains turn them on.

Then, of course, seeking an objective definition, I also read that some sexuality snobs said that while sapiosexuality might be a preference, it certainly wasn’t an orientation. I thought, now wait a minute, why not? What was that saying? That the brain is the most powerful sex organ? In fact, it is the master sex organ because without it, all sexual activity would be moot. So why not be sexually oriented toward intelligence?

These can be put down to the kind of rhetorical questions that assail an experienced editorial writer, I suppose. But that wasn’t the only thing I had to ponder, because I was floored by the brand new (for me) discovery that, besides the handful of sexual orientations about which I’d already reduced my ignorance, another couple of scores existed as well!

It was my own fault. This was what I got for looking up a new term. Start pulling on a loose thread, and the whole shebang came unraveled. How the heck many sexualities can there be, you ask? ¨

Here’s a little sampling. 

Allosexual: As far as I can tell, most of us are this. It means, simply, someone who experiences sexual attraction, period. Doesn’t everybody, you ask? No. Allosexuality is the opposite of Asexuality, and one helps define the other. Someone asexual either has very reduced sexual response, or simply doesn’t experience sexual attraction of any kind. That, however, doesn’t necessarily keep asexuals from feeling romantic attraction to specific people of both (all) sexes. And as such, they may even engage in sexual activity—presumably without really being into it. 

Androsexual means being attracted to all things male and masculine. That seems pretty straightforward, like a me Tarzan, you Jane, kind of thing, but it’s not that simple. It has to do with being attracted to anyone who identifies as being male or masculine—regardless of biology, anatomy or whatever sex was assigned to the object of that attraction on his or her birth certificate.

Then there’s Aromantic (as opposed to “a romantic”), which simply means people, regardless of sex or gender, who experience little or no romantic attraction to anybody. But that definition says nothing about their possibly of still having a strong sex drive and taking part in “unromantic” sex. Or maybe they just end up being Autosexual, which sounds an awful lot like what we used to call “self-abuse”, but apparently isn’t, because (it says here), “someone’s desire to engage in sexual behavior such as masturbation doesn’t determine whether they’re autosexual…” So, wait, I’m confused. If that doesn’t define autosexual, what does?

Now, an Autoromantic is a whole other ball of wax. These are individuals who are attracted to themselves. Autoromantics apparently find themselves experiencing relationships they have with themselves as romantic. Not sure how that works, but it would be worthwhile asking somebody if that’s like the amorous relationship former President Donald Trump has with himself. 

And those are just the ones on the A-list!

Later, we have the Bicurious (people who might ask themselves what their sexuality really is and, as a result, explore bisexual relationships), Bisexual (somebody who is sexually, romantically or emotionally attracted to people of more than one sexual orientation or to different genders—in other words, Bicurious folks who have made up their minds), and Biromantics (individuals who become romantically but not necessarily sexually attracted to people of more than one gender—which kind of sounds to me like a bicurious introvert, but hey, that’s not a scientific explanation, just my own speculation).

Mexican artist Frida Kahlo was a gender non-conformity trailblazer.
Openly bisexual, she would occasionally dress in clothing considered
 stereotypically male, as in this family photo, in which she (center)
 is dressed in a men’s suit with her hair pulled back.  Her artwork
also reflected her thoughts surrounding identity,
gender and sexuality.

Then, there are the Closeted—as the term suggests, people who are “in the closet”, or in other words, individuals who keep their sexual identity, attractions, or gender expressions secret from the public. Some “closet whatevers” may only keep their secrets in certain publics, where they are afraid of being rejected, targeted or discriminated against, but will reveal their proclivities in “friendly” surroundings. Now, the opposite of Closeted is
Coming Out, or in other words, making the decision to reveal, or even advertise, one’s sexual identity, proclivity or gender. I’ve known quite a few outed people and have talked to them about it enough to know that it often comes after a long process (frequently years) of indecision, guilt, social ostracism and general suffering. Which is why I’ve always held those who come out in high esteem for the courage and self-acceptance that it requires. Now, things get complicated with the term Cupiosexual. These are asexual individuals who may not experience sexual attraction per se, but who still have a desire to take part in sexual behavior, or even in a sexual relationship. (Hey, don’t look at me; I have no idea how this works).

Next on the list are Demisexuals and Demiromantics. These are very similar terms in that they refer to having a sexual and/or romantic attraction only under specific circumstances. This would apply, for instance, to people who need to build a romantic or emotional bond before feeling sexual attraction. I think this must apply to quite a number of people I know.

Then there are also people who just kind of go with the flow. They are aptly described as Fluid, which has almost nothing to do with wetness as such, but rather, is a description of people who take it for granted that sexual behavior, sexual attraction, or sexuality in general can change in accordance with the times and the circumstances. Someone with fluid sexuality will embrace shifts in their attractions and behavior in keeping with the circumstances they happen to be living, or simply over the course of time.

I finally hit on one I knew—or thought I did—when I came to Gay on the list. As most of us know, gay individuals (a term that achieved popularity in the sixties) are ones who feel sexually, romantically and emotionally attracted to people of their own sex. This is sometimes so strong that a gay friend of mine once told me, when I mentioned common everyday marriage to him, that he couldn’t help me, since he had never been able to understand hetero (we’ll get to that in a minute) relationships.

I also got into a discussion with another gay friend once when I talked about “gay people” meaning both men and women. He laughed derisively and said, “Wow, Caveman, you’ve gotta get out more! Only men are gay. Women are lesbians.” Typical of my intellectual arrogance, I pressed the point, saying that wasn’t true. That, in fact, the “gay community”, as conceived of in the sixties, included both male and female “homosexuals”. That really cracked him up. He said he wouldn’t know. He’d have to get out his “gay history book” for that one.

Well, I have to say, if you’re reading this, pal, the accepted definition of Gay, according to the list I’m quoting from, stands for both males and females. But the list concedes that “some gay-identified women prefer the term ‘lesbian’, while others might prefer ‘’queer’ or ‘gay’. And, okay, to your point, it also says, “It’s also best to ask which word or term someone uses to describe themselves.” Also, I guess your crack about the “gay history book” wasn’t far off, since the report also says, “The fields of medicine and psychology previously referred to this sexual orientation as homosexual. “Homosexual” is now viewed as an outdated and offensive term and shouldn’t be used to refer to LGBTQIA+ people. (Oh man, more initials to memorize)!

Graysexual: Right, that’s not a misprint. It’s a term to describe a “gray area” (which, out of longstanding habit, I would spell as “grey area”) on the sexuality index. It is reserved for people who may not be overly sexually attracted to anybody, but who also don’t identify as asexual/aromantic. They may experience a certain level of sexual attraction or desire, but not as intensely or frequently as those who identify as completely beyond asexuality.  Similarly, someone Grayromantic might feel the occasional romantic twinge, but not as strongly or as often as someone beyond the bounds of aromanticality.

Gynesexual, as should be clear from the prefix, is all about being attracted to women, females and all things feminine. As with Androsexuality (see above) Gynesexuality isn’t just about guys who like girls. The term specifically includes those who identify as women, females or feminine, regardless of questions of biology, anatomy or birth-certificate sex.

I found familiar territory when I got to Heterosexual. But by the time I got to this term that describes Me, I would have almost modified it with “boring”, as in Boring Heterosexual. As most of you know, the term describes people who are sexually, romantically and/or emotionally attracted to people of the opposite gender (although I have to admit, I’m getting pretty confused about what “opposite” means). This heading is more commonly known as “Straight”. But that doesn’t take into account that trans-gender people (someone whose gender identity differs from that typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth) can also be heterosexual, as can cisgender folks (someone whose internal sense of gender corresponds with the sex the person was identified as having at birth), which is pretty much the majority of people. People like us aren’t included in the initials LGBTQIA+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning, Intersex—a general term to describe people born with sexual characteristics that are not typically male or female, including sex chromosomes, external genitalia, or an internal reproductive system—and Asexual), with the plus being added, I presume, to symbolize “whatever else might crop up in the future.”

And the list goes on:

Labidoist Asexual (people who are ostensibly asexual but who have sexual cravings satisfied by other means, such as masturbation), Monosexual (typically, those who feel attracted only to people of one gender—meaning people who are exclusively heterosexual, gay or lesbian), Non-Labidoist Asexuals (people with no sexual attraction or sex drive at all), Omnisexuals (people with an indiscriminate sexual appetite that spans the entire spectrum of sexual possibilities), and similarly, Pansexuals/Panromantics (people who can feel sexual, romantic or emotional attraction to anyone, regardless of their gender, sex or sexual orientation).

Which leads us to Polysexuality (bisexual, pansexual, omnisexual and queer people, among others). Passing is when a person of any other sexuality is assumed to be hetero or cisgender.  Queer is a term we heteros were told we weren’t allowed to use anymore because it was insulting to homosexual folks. This makes it a lesser cousin to the N-word, which some African Americans use pretty regularly in vernacular conversation, but which is vile and discriminatory when it issues from the lips of a white person. In the case of sexuality, it is the Q in LBGTQIA+, and is a term used in that community to describe anyone who is not strictly hetero. It’s a word given to grey areas that don’t fit neatly into the gay, lesbian or bisexual categories. As such, it has no dependence on sex, sexuality or gender. There is also, however, another Q—namely, Questioning. This describes the process of becoming “curious” about exploring nuances in one’s sexuality. And it also applies to people who are currently exploring their sexuality or gender. 

Sex-Averse is not so much a choice of sexuality as exactly the opposite—people in the “asexual” classification who are utterly disinterested in or even violently opposed to sex and sexual behavior and activity in general. Sex-Favorable is the term reserved for usually asexual people who can, in certain situations, be positive toward or even favorable to sex. Then there is Sex-Indifferent, in other words, asexual-leaning people who are, nevertheless, indifferent to or neutral to sex or sexual behavior issues. Sex-Repulsed, meanwhile, is, as the name implies, the term that describes asexuals who are, directly opposed to and repelled by anything to do with sex. Skoliosexuality is the word for those who are attracted to others who do not identify as cis-gender—for instance, non-binary, genderqueer, and transgender individuals. Spectrasexuals are sexually or romantically attracted to people of multiple or varied sexual and gender persuasions, but not necessarily to all of them.

From what we’ve seen in the contents of this list, it would appear that the only way to quickly differentiate in polite conversation between the sexual majority and others would be by describing them as either “straight” or “queer”.

But in the end, why describe, classify, or pigeonhole others at all? Why not just accept everyone as another human being like you or me, with all of our doubts, dichotomies, preferences, proclivities, quirks and idiosyncrasies? But in the end, nevertheless, all children of the Earth, just seeking to get through this life the best way we know how. What business is it of mine what lifestyle you embrace? What business is it or yours whom I fall in love with, or what we do behind closed doors to express it, and in the intimacy of private lives?

AN INDIAN LAKE HOMAGE

Ohio’s Indian Lake super-tornado is already old news on national news schedules, but for many of the residents of the villages of Lakeview and Russells Point, the nightmare continues. It’s one thing to hear about one of these super-storms that are an ever more frequent consequence of global climate change—to see the news coverage and pictures of the wreckage in a place you wouldn’t be able to pinpoint on a map without the help of Google—and entirely another to be able to picture the location in your mind, smell the air, hear the sounds, remember the buildings and some of the people, recall the curves in the road leading to a place that you’ve visited many times since childhood. No matter how much you might empathize with and feel sorry for people who aren’t your neighbors who have been caught in a natural catastrophe, it’s not the same as when it strikes so close to home.

Lakeview and Russells Point are villages in Logan County, located six miles from one another on US Route 33, along the waterfront of the Indian Lake Reservoir. Indian Lake is just twenty miles southeast of my hometown of Wapakoneta, which is also on US 33—a road that connects towns all through the central part of the state with the capital in Columbus. The two villages have similar demographics and stable populations of about twelve hundred to fourteen hundred people each. Both are best known as summer resorts. But of late, the two towns have also become retirement communities and places where people from larger surrounding towns and cities have vacation homes and cottages.

Russells Point takes its name from James Russell, the original owner of the land around which the village was to grow. It officially became a community in 1913, when a post office, which is still in operation today, was first opened. Some of the stores and restaurants in the downtown Main Street strip of US 33 along the reservoir can be accessed from either the road or from the lake, with docks having been built to allow patrons to tie up their small craft.

For many years, Russells Point was famous for its amusement park and ballroom. It has been closed for many years now, since the seventies, I believe, but I still remember it well, even though the ballroom—better known as the Minnewawa Dance Hall—had already closed by the time I was a teen. The only remaining vestige of that one-time entertainment Mecca is the old steel-girder Sandy Beach bridge that crosses a section of the Indian Lake harbor.  

Before much bigger Ohio parks, like Cedar Point and King’s Island existed, the Russells Point Sandy Beach Park was a pretty big deal. Even more famous than the amusement park, however, was the dance hall. When my mother and father were dating age, some of the greatest big bands in America played there—among them, the swing bands of Paul Whiteman, Glenn Miller, Stan Kenton, Woody Herman, Billy May, Gene Krupa and many more. In its heyday, Russells Point was known as “the Atlantic City of the Midwest”. And the Minnewawa Dance Hall was billed as the largest in Ohio, with capacity for a hundred dancing couples and with two separate bandstands.

The Minnewawa was a venue for some major contests, during the Great Depression Era, when marathon dancing was a fad. The rules of the marathons included a requirement for couples to dance forty-five minutes out of every hour, until all but one couple had been eliminated. In the mid-nineteen-thirties, the Minnewawa Dance Hall hosted the National Endurance Dance Marathon. The competition ended up lasting an absolutely legendary eighty-eight days and two hours.

From my teen years in the sixties, I have vivid memories of going there with friends, walking along the old boardwalk, visiting the penny arcades, going through the funhouse with its crazy mirrors and scary nooks and crannies, riding the thousand-foot long rollercoaster and viewing the star-studded night sky from the summit of the Ferris wheel. It was a magical place, but by then on its last legs, a shadow of its former glory, a bit run down and seedy. But all of that seemed to us to give it an even more exciting carnival-like thrill.

The Minnewawa, when the house was jumpin'

The Village of Lakeview pre-dates Russells Point by a few years. It sprang up on land owned by a settler named L.T. Dysert, who lived there with his wife Sarah. The town was actually plotted as a settlement as of 1881. Dysert and his wife ran a small trading post, and the village quickly grew up around it. By 1895, Lakeview had enough residents to gather the two hundred signatures necessary to officially incorporate the village.

The boon to Lakeview’s birth as a tourist destination was construction of a new section of the Toledo and Ohio Central Railway, which arrived simultaneously with the village’s founding in 1895. Traffic on the rail line was intense, with four passenger trains a day making whistle stops there, carrying both passengers and the mail. Freight trains kept Lakeview well-stocked with vital supplies and coal, and also helped the town build its commerce by picking up the lumber, grain, fruit and vegetables produced in the area around Indian Lake. And by 1899, Lakeview had further advanced with the advent of telephone service, and later, electricity.  

Early on, Lakeview boasted a sawmill and lumber yard, as well as a barrel-making operation. A tile mill and a grain elevator would be the next additions. Both the elevator and lumber yard were set up close to the tracks for easy shipping to other parts of the country.

But again, it was rail services that bolstered the village’s tourist industry, as 1908 brought the arrival of the “Interurban”, an electric train service run by the West Ohio Electric Railway, which also operated out of my hometown of Wapakoneta, one county west. In Wapak, there was an Interurban station next door to the site of what would eventually be my own family’s restaurant, the Teddy Bear. Back then, the lot my grandfather would buy in 1945 was still occupied by an eatery known as Zint’s Cabin, which was right across Blackhoof Street from the Zint family’s sweet store known as the Candy Kitchen.

Cottonwood Resort, Lakeview.

In 1913, a concrete retaining wall was built between Lakeview and Russells Point, which further deepened and expanded the lake and would eventually help integrate the Lakeview tourist community with the Sandy Beach Amusement Park. It’s interesting to note that the site of Indian Lake was originally a Native American settlement. The basin for the lake was a six hundred-forty-acre area that featured a series of ponds, lagoons and marshes. It was best known as a good hunting ground and fishing spot. But in the 1850s, the basin was damned up to create the Lewistown Reservoir, a six thousand three hundred-acre feeder lake to provide water to the Miami and Erie Canal, a mule-driven barge transport system that ran the entire length of the state from the Ohio River in Cincinnati to Lake Erie in Toledo.

As rail services advanced in Ohio, however, the canal system was rendered obsolete. The Lewistown Reservoir, now called Indian Lake, became more and more a playground for boating enthusiasts and anglers, as well as a popular beach resort. Lakeview, like Russells Point, grew along with the popularity of the lake as a vacation spot. By the thirties and forties, it was a bustling town with several bars and restaurants, rental cottages and hotels as well as a healthy downtown area where, among other businesses, there was a Farmer’s Bank, a Western Auto Store, a car dealership, an ice cream shop, grocery and clothing stores, and, oddly enough, a furrier’s shop.

Then as now, the Lakeview and Russells Point communities were known for their solidarity. This was largely thanks to a united farming community in the surrounding area. Collective memory can still recall when the local Farmers’ Association owned a large community barn in nearby Stokes Township, where area farmers could store equipment and machinery. But it also became a meeting place where local farmers and their wives socialized. It was always a potluck affair in which the farm wives would cook up washtubs full of fried chicken and mashed potatoes and would make gallons of lemonade, so that friends and families could get together and share a meal and a chat.

Al Capone, angler

During the Prohibition Era, famed Chicago gangster and bootlegger Al Capone was rumored to have a hideout on one of the lake’s islands. He was also rumored to make a regular stop at the now locally iconic Alpha Bar, then a speakeasy, in Wapakoneta, to have a few drinks with his “boys” on the way to Indian Lake, since, so the legend goes, the Alpha was a customer of the Capone organization’s illegal booze operations. But like I say, that’s all part of local folklore and I have no way of confirming it. It’s part and parcel of the rich storytelling tradition of my grandfathers’ generation.    

My own memories of Indian Lake are many, rich and lasting. But these are a few flashbacks that immediately spring to mind:

A NEWLAND FAMILY REUNION on a Fourth of July, in the early nineteen-sixties. Everybody was there, my cousins, aunts and uncles, even Great-Grandma Maude. The most colorful character by far was always my Great-Uncle Dale, Grandpa Murel’s younger brother. I only saw Uncle Dale at the occasional family get-together, some years for Thanksgiving, others for the odd Newland family reunion, still others for the Fourth of July, like this day. The weather failed to cooperate that July Fourth. It ended up being unseasonably chilly with a steady drizzle.

Dale Newland was born in 1900, and when he was a young man in the nineteen twenties and thirties, there was nothing cooler for a streetwise guy of his ilk growing up in the industrial city of Lima, Ohio, than to emulate the gangsters that were his heroes. Dale, even then, in the sixties, always dressed the part in his Mafia-style suits, dark shirts with light-color ties, two-tone shoes and finely styled fedoras. The look was accented by vintage Ray-Ban sunglasses and a pricey twenty-five-cent cigar with a green tobacco wrapper. He was always a sort of marginal character, walking a tightrope between righteousness and criminality. The most “honest” thing he did was sell used cars, and was so good at it that his name was known up and down the Dixie Highway. He could go to just about any used car lot from Michigan to Florida and immediately find a job.

Dale’s only claim to fame as an actual gangster was, legend had it, his sale of a hijacked truckload of new tires to the Allen County Sheriff’s Department for a bargain basement price, without the sheriff’s ever being the wiser.

It was Dale’s second wife Martha who saved the day that Fourth, managing to reserve the party room in the Redbird restaurant (which my dad Whitie jokingly referred to as "The Early Bird", a name that stuck at our house) on the main drag in Russells Point, where she then worked as a cook. The lunch was a great success with Newlands and in-laws from all over showing up to enjoy one another’s company. But just after lunch, there was an ungodly commotion out in the street and most of the men decided to go out and see what was happening. I must have been about ten or eleven at the time and, with a couple of my cousins, tagged along.

What I witnessed was the first riot I’d ever seen. A huge group of college-aged kids had gotten out of hand at the amusement park across the way, and the police had been called in to restore order. Now everywhere on the main drag in town, kids were running amok, kicking over trash cans, throwing cans and bottles at police, breaking windows and generally creating chaos. Fire trucks arrived to give the outnumbered riot cops a hand, by laying into the rioters with powerful blasts of water from their fire hoses, while the police fired tear gas and charged at the kids with their batons.

We were all standing on the sidelines, close enough to watch the action—as if it were some strange and violent sport—but far enough back to keep out of the fray. All of the sudden, however, I started hearing a familiar voice rooting for the rioters and I looked to see my Great-Uncle Dale stepping onto the curb and gesticulating at the kids with his cigar. “Hey kids,” he shouted, “Don’t let those cops do that to you! Hit ‘em back! Knock ‘em flat! They got no right to do that to you. Nail ‘em!”

I saw when one of the policemen got the attention of one of the guys manning a fire hose and pointed Dale out. Dale never saw it coming and got washed right off of his feet. I found this hilariously funny, since it was like watching a cartoon character getting washed away. Dale, for his part, was madder than a wet hornet, and wanted to take on the entire police and fire departments single-handedly. Cooler heads prevailed and the Newland men managed to wrestle him off the street and back inside the restaurant, before he got carted away. 

A WEEKEND WITH MY FRIEND, Tom, whose grandfather kept a small cabin cruiser at the lake, and docked it in what I found to be a delightfully crazy invention called a “boatel”—like a motel, but for boats. The “garage” was a shed built over the water, with a private dock for each unit where boats could be tied up. The dock, in turn, led up to the entrance to the living quarters. I was impressed!

Sandy Beach Bridge, Lakeview Harbor

Tom tried to teach me how to get up on a pair of water skis, but I mostly skipped along the surface of the water on my chin behind his grandfather’s boat. Another friend, Mark, later also tried to give me skiing lessons at Indian Lake, behind his father’s speedboat, but that didn’t take either. I drank a lot of lake water, but could never rise to a standing position.

I RECALL CHILLY AUTUMN MORNING Indian Lake fishing expeditions with a fellow called Bill Benzing, who, with his wife Greta, rented a five room apartment we had in a big house where we lived on West Auglaize Street in Wapakoneta, when I was ten or eleven. Bill was a nice and very pleasant man, who was good and incredibly patient with kids. Even the names of the places we went to fish I found intriguing. He would show them to me on the map and pronounce their names—places like Turkey Foot and Blackhawk—so that to me they sounded like Shangri-La. I remember, in particular, standing with him and fishing from a wooden pier at one of several landings along the lakeshore. It was a foggy morning with a persistent mist. Bill shared the sugary coffee from his Thermos with me and the homemade oatmeal cookies that Greta had sent along. We stood there snug in out jackets and jeans fishing from that pier, and it seemed to me to be the happiest morning of my life.

AND THEN THERE WAS a foggy, rainy Saturday morning one autumn when I was about six, and my Grandma Alice called, told my mother that she and Grandpa Murel were going over to the lake to do some fishing. Did she think I might want to tag along?

That’s the first outing I recall in which I had my Grandma and Grandpa Newland all to myself—no siblings, no cousins, just me. And it turned out to be a memorable day. Just the trip alone was exciting. It was the first time I had ever gone to Indian Lake, and at that tender age, the twenty miles over on two-lane road seemed like quite a journey. The countryside between Wapakoneta and Indian Lake was all new to me and I relished every minute of it, kneeling on the back seat of Murel’s Studebaker, facing the passenger’s side window. But the rain was persisting and, a worrier by nature, I was also afraid that, at any time, my grandfather might turn the car around and take me back home.

“Dang rain!” I complained.

But Grandpa Murel said, “Why, what’s wrong with a little rain, bud? Rainy days are the best days to go a-feeshin’. That’s when they bite the best. When it’s a-rainin’ a little.”

I was relieved. I knew that if it had been my mother, Reba Mae, and it was raining when we arrived at our destination, she would have said, “Okay, it’s raining, everybody back in the car.” But seasoned fisherman that he was, Murel wasn’t cowed in the least by a little precipitation. When we got to the lake, Grandpa stopped near a concrete pier, then he retrieved his see-through nylon raincoat from the back seat of the car and pulled it on over his white sports shirt and cardigan. His battered, felt fishing hat—a faded, sweat-stained, dark green Mallory of Fifth Avenue that had once been a dress hat—was already on his head. His fishing shoes were scuffed old two-tone wingtips and his fishing pants the bottom half of a dark suit he no longer wore as such.

Meanwhile, Grandma Alice broke out her long-billed fishing cap—the one with the marlin emblazoned on the front—and pulled it down over her blue-white perm. Then she dug through the trunk for her faithful green men’s cardigan, the one with the black suede patches on the elbows, and slipped it on over her sober cotton housedress. She handed me the canvas windbreaker Reba Mae had sent along for me and I put it on, along with my red baseball cap.

I sidled up beside Grandma. We were the cane-pole fishermen. We left Grandpa to his casting further down the quay. This was his fishing spot and the lake was part of his life insurance sales territory. He knew people here and they knew him, so while he fished, he chatted with others on the pier. And they only moved to “try their luck” further one way or another, or drove off to find another fishing hole altogether when he started hinting that they might want to talk to him about expanding their insurance coverage.

Eventually, Grandma Alice laid her cane pole on the pier and, keeping close watch on her bobber, dug into the picnic basket. She never brought anything boring like apples, celery or carrots. Today it was pressed ham sandwiches on Wonder Bread, slathered with butter, crunchy, salty Mike-Sell’s potato chips, hot, sugary coffee with Half-and-Half in the Thermoses and peanut butter cookies for dessert. And as an added treat for later, Milky Way candy bars, her own personal favorite.

We were sitting there munching on our snack when the drizzle turned to a light steady rain. And true to Murel’s prediction, the fish started to bite—everywhere, apparently, except where he was casting. Grandma Alice was the first to pull out a nice-sized bluegill. Then I snagged a nice crappy. Grandma snaked in a crappy as well. Murel, who’d been bragging about how he was “casting out where the big ones are”, moved over our way and started trying to toss his line in between Grandma’s and mine. We each pulled out another fish while his bobber just sat there in the water with never a twitch. He was fit to be tied, until finally, after Grandma and I had brought in a third fish each, his bobber jerked once and then got pulled under. It was clear from how his rod bowed that it was something heavier that a bluegill or a sunfish. He finally reeled in a nice-sized bass.  He gloated, good-naturedly, saying things like, “Now this is what a real fisherman goes for, not them little minnows.”

Grandma said, “Shut-up, Murel,” put the fish she’d caught on a stringer, and re­-baited her hook.

By the time we were chilled and soaked enough to be ready to head home, we had a nice mess of fish to fry, and I had a memory of a day with Murel and Alice that I would never forget.  

DECADES LATER—last year, in fact—I spent another pleasant autumn day near and at the lake. I had discovered that the cemetery in the village of Alger, Ohio, was a veritable genealogical goldmine if I wanted to track down my Newland family roots. In the company of my friend Mary Jo Knoch, we searched the little cemetery in Alger and found Newland family members dating back to 1812, including my great-great grandfather, some of his siblings, one of his two wives, and other members of his immediate family.

It was only after making these discoveries that I realized how close Alger was to Indian Lake, an area where the Newland name was well-known. Mary Jo and I ended up driving the nine miles to the lake, turning off the highway onto Newland Road, and visiting Newland’s Landing. This all convinced me that members of our family who had always said that the Indian Lake Newlands and the Wapakoneta Newlands weren’t related were wrong. And I promised myself that on my next trip back to Ohio, I would go to the lake and try to talk to some Newlands to try and find out if they were related to the Alger Newlands, and, therefore, to me.  

With the tornado and terrible devastation in Lakeview, I was fondly recalling the pleasant days I had spent over the years in the Russells Point-Lakeview area. I watched the lists to see if the people I knew had checked in as being safe. When I messaged one of them, a Lakeview resident who hadn’t checked in, she said, “We’re fine, but this place will never be the same again.”

I suddenly not only felt sad about the people who had lost their lives, their homes and their businesses, but also about the loss of those two communities as I had always known them. I suddenly was confronted with the reality that those two picturesque villages would never be the same, even once they were eventually rebuilt. The Lakeview and the Russells Point that I knew as a kid and as a teen would be no longer.

I couldn’t help but strike a parallel in my mind with the big old barn of a house on Van Horn Street in Wapakoneta, where my maternal grandparents once lived. I could only imagine the pain and emptiness the people in Lakeview and Russells Point must feel when faced with their disastrous loss. I felt it must be like when I would travel back to visit Wapakoneta and would go to that corner where my Grandpa Vern and Grandma Myrt’s home only exists now in my memory.

My brother Dennis and me at our Grandpa and Grandma
Weber's house on Van Horn St. Wapakoneta

But as long as I’m alive, I’ll be able to park on the opposite side of the street, gaze at the desolate parking lot that replaced it and still picture that house--the sunny country kitchen, the narrow cellar stairs, Grandma Myrt's canned goods and muslin-wrapped fruitcakes on the shelves down there and her wringer washer and tub on the other side, the linoleum-floored living room with couch, armchair, old black and white Admiral TV and Grandma's treadle-operated Singer, right under the window with the lace curtains she had made herself, and next to the little desk, under a cuckoo clock where Grandpa kept important papers and other treasures, like his German father's gold watch that he would give to me when I was twelve. I recall the front room, that they called the parlor, and that was off limits to children, the narrow mill-style stairs up to the three bedrooms, only one of which was in use now, but how the other two were kept fully made up anyway, with hand-sewn quilts on the beds. The little hall closet up there, cornered under the gambrel-roof eave, with its ever-locked door because it was where Grandpa Vern kept all of his guns--all but one, the over-and-under that he stowed loaded behind his armchair in the living room, "just in case". I remember the downstairs bedroom that had doors that entered it from the kitchen and from the parlor. In winter they slept upstairs because it was warmer, and in the summer, downstairs because it was cooler, since the house had no central heating or cooling system, just a big oil stove in the kitchen and another one in the living room. I remember the closed back porch where there was usually a bushel basket of pears, apples or walnuts, their sweet smell mixing with the kerosene stink of the glass-globed coal oil lamp on the shelf by the window and the barn lantern hanging from a nail on the wall, and all of Grandpa's work-outerwear, jackets, coats, rain and sweat-stained hats and wash-faded engineer caps, all hanging from hooks on the wall, a disused window that gave onto the living room and that was now painted over. I recall the summer kitchen, the spicy smell of homemade sausages still penetrating the walls even though the little building had long-since become a store room. The three, splintery, homemade steps down from the porch, always carefully painted in matte grey. The one-time woodshed that now was kept locked and that served as a garden-tool shed. The big old clapboard barn where Vern parked his Galaxy 500 and homemade trailer. There too was his workbench with the tool-board above it and a vice at one end, the former hay loft that by then was stacked with lumber and auto-parts. The little white picket fence around Grandma's flower garden and what she called her "back-forty" beyond--an incredibly productive vegetable garden that produced everything from tomatoes and cabbage to spinach and from rhubarb to turnips and kohlrabi. The carefully-manicured square of lawn that reached the sidewalk on Van Horn.

For now, it's all still there for me, but my perception is that when I'm gone, so it will be too, forever, unless there is still someone interested in the stories I tell. Sadder still, it won't mean a thing to anyone but me, unless I can effectively pass those memories on. That’s why it’s so important for those of us who have memorable stories of the past in communities like Lakeview and Russells Point to share them, record them, and commit them to collective memory, so that what no longer exists physically can still be brought to life in the minds and imaginations of generations to come.

 

A BRAND NEW WORLD

Since last Thursday, I’m living in a brand new world.

Over the course of last year and the year before, I had three surgeries on my left eye. One on the retina, one to remove a cataract the first surgery caused, and a final one, a laser procedure, to improve the results of the first two. 

Suddenly, I had a left eye that could see quite well. At that time, that was a major advancement. But after that eye healed—the cataract operation was more traumatic than normal because of the previous retinal procedure and because the cataract had been in there so long that it had grown tough and hard to remove—the lens prescriptions the surgeon wrote me were less than effective for reading, and for writing on the laptop, which are my principal activities. But when I complained about this, the surgeon gave me another eye test and insisted that, with corrective lenses, I was seeing “one hundred percent in both eyes.”

The guy who turned me on to the nature of the problem was the optician, who is a highly experienced professional. I went to him to see if I could finagle a more powerful mid-range prescription for my computer glasses. He refused, saying, “The problem you’re having isn’t one that can be solved with more augmentation. It’s that your left eye is now almost perfect and your right eye requires a plus-4.75 augmentation. I think that’s causing you to have a problem of focus.”

In other words, it wasn’t that, “with corrective lenses, I was seeing one hundred percent in both eyes,” but rather that, with glasses, I was seeing one hundred percent with each eye. I just wasn’t able to focus when I put the two together.

I took this theory to the surgeon who scratched his chin and said, “Hmmm, yes, maybe. But the prescription I gave you is correct.”

So for a while, more than a year, in fact, I took that to be the new norm. I was just never going to see correctly again. It was what it was and I’d have to live with it. Part of getting older. I should be grateful, I told myself, that my vision was, at least, now close to perfect in one eye.

But, I being me, I decided to go back to the ophthalmologist I’d had prior to the three left-eye operations. She said the eye that had been operated on was doing quite well and that I’d recovered almost twenty-twenty vision in it. Other than a remaining small distortion from a defect in the macula that the retina operation had failed to correct, that eye was seeing as well as it possibly could.  “Actually, she said, for long-distance vision, you see better with no prescription than with the slight augmentation you have in your glasses now for the left eye. As for the other eye, the plus-4.75 prescription I was using was correct, but she wanted to run more tests.

So I had another appointment with a colleague of hers, who moved me around from one machine to another, showing me all sorts of light shows and running a tomography scan. Then, I got sent back to her. “That eye,” she said, “has a pretty major cataract. That, combined with your need for such a high augmentation in that eye, and the fact that the other one has almost perfect vision…well, I’m not surprised you’re having trouble seeing properly. That cataract should be operated on and a lens put in. You can take these results back to your surgeon, or, we can operate here.

“Let’s do it,” I said, “and the sooner the better.”

Within a week, I had an appointment with their surgeon, who was also the head of that ophthalmological institute, which was named after him.

I quickly learned that, besides being a crackerjack eye surgeon, Patricio, the doctor, is also a people person. He’s interested in everyone else’s story, and has a whopper of his own. I knew right away, from his accent in Spanish, that he wasn’t originally from Patagonia or from Buenos Aires. Patagonia is in southern Argentina and his accent was definitely from the north. Tucumán Province, it turns out, a lush, green place known as “the garden of the Republic.”  I later found out that he, like myself, has lived in Patagonia for nearly thirty years, but, fortunately for me, divides his professional practice between the ski resort town near my home, and his own province in the north.

He also picked up on my accent in Spanish and asked where I was from originally.

“The US,” I said.

“I know a bit of the US,” he said. “Where abouts?”

“Ohio.”

“That’s in the north, right?”

“Yes, just below Michigan and between Pennsylvania and Indiana. Borders on the Ohio River in the south and Lake Erie in the north.”

“Which city?”

“Well, I’m not from the city. I’m from a small rural town.”

“Oh? What’s it called?” he asked.

“Wapakoneta.”

“Say again?”

“Wa_pa_ko_ne_ta.”

“A Native American name, of course,” he said more than asked.

“Exactly, I said. “It was the chief council house of the Shawnee Nation, before the whites screwed them over, went back on a reservation deal, and marched them off to Kansas. The tribe is now based in Oklahoma and numbers less than eight thousand today, I think.”

“I’ve been to Oklahoma!” he said. “Tulsa.”

One small step...Neil lands on the moon

“Other than that, Wapakoneta is famous for pretty much only one thing,” I said. “Being the home town of Neil Armstrong, the first…”

“The first man on the moon!” he broke in. “Of course, I know who Neil Armstrong was!”

Turns out eyes aren’t Patricio’s only interest. He is also a knowledgeable aerospace enthusiast and a civil pilot himself. In that regard, he said, “When we have more time, I’ll tell you about how my flying and Tulsa are connected.”

Neil's mom, Viola...I was her paperboy

For right now, however, he was fascinated with every detail I could tell him about Wapakoneta, Neil Armstrong and Ohio’s history in aerospace. I told him every anecdote I knew—the Armstrong Museum, the bike Neil rode to deliver papers and save money for flying lessons, the legend about his having a pilot’s license before he could drive a car, his adventures as a test pilot and America’s first civilian astronaut, and so on. I also told him about how Neil had played basketball with my Uncle Don in high school, and how I’d been Neil’s mother’s paperboy, how she’d invite me in on cold winter days to warm up and have some hot chocolate, and how she’d let me hold a scale model of Neil’s X-15 rocket plane, “if I was really careful with it.”

The doctor was spellbound and added stories of his own from his aerospace research. And that led us to talk about the Wright Brothers, my visits to Kitty Hawk when I was in the Army, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, UFO research…

Only when we were finished with that conversation did we talk about my eyes. He patiently explained that when one eye is twenty-twenty, if the augmentation needed in the other eye is anything over plus-3.00, “The brain simply can’t compute it,” he said, “and there’s no way that the eyes are going to function correctly together. The good news is that the retina, macula and eye in general on that side are in great shape. I can operate on that, put a good lens, like a Bausch and Lomb, in there, and you won’t need glasses except to read.”

Patricio scheduled me for the operation just three days later. His assistant gave me a regimen of eye-drop applications for that morning. I began with that early since it’s a long drive to town. My wife, Virginia, drove me and as she did, I kept checking my watch and applying drops as required. 

We arrived more than an hour early. I talked to Patricio’s assistant. She said I should do one more application of one of the eye-drops and three more, one every fifteen minutes, of the other kind. That one was to dilate my pupil. While I was sitting there, my optometrist passed by, said hello, then laughed and said, “Your pupil’s this big,” and she made a circle with her two hands about the size of a saucer. “Good luck!” she said and slipped into her consulting room.

One after another, patients were being called into the operating room. One about every half-hour to forty minutes. While one was being operated on, another was being prepped.

The doctor was running a little late. After three procedures on the other eye, it should have been a walk in the park for me, but I’m always antsy before a medical procedure, and especially anything to do with my eyes. My surgery was supposed to be at ten-thirty, but it was well after eleven when my name was called.

A very nice young woman, masked up and in operating room garb, led me into what was, basically, a one-person, pocket-sized eye clinic. It was modern, bright, immaculate and fully equipped with ultra-modern gadgets. She showed me into a dressing room with a comfortable armchair, invited me to strip to my underwear, and left me with a folded pile of things that included a disposable hospital gown, a hairnet and two similar nets to cover my feet.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes to get you,” she said amiably.

When it was time, she led me into a miniature operating room that truly looked like it belonged to an aerospace enthusiast. As soon as the doctor saw me, he said, “Dan! Good to see you! Climb up onto the table and we’ll accommodate you.” As the two women assisting him adjusted my head in a kind of restraint, strapped a blood pressure cuff on my arm and helped him disinfect my face, which I had already washed thoroughly with iodine soap, and place a surgical drape around my eye—there was no IV sedation drip as in my first two operations—he was regaling the two women with all of the Armstrong anecdotes that I’d told him the day before. He also told them about Wapakoneta, about Ohio, and about everything he could remember from our earlier conversation.

As one of the women was dripping local anesthetic into my eye, the doctor said, “So, I told you I was going to tell you how I ended up in Tulsa. What I didn’t tell you is that it was also where I accidentally met up with Obama.”

And from that moment on until the operation was done, Patricio was storytelling nonstop. I kept wondering, “How does this man do it?!” Telling stories, one after another, while handling such a precise operation. The only answer seems to me to be that he’s a genius and an extraordinary eye surgeon.

“So anyway,” he said, “there were three of us flying some Cessnas from the US to Argentina. Tulsa was a logical rest and refueling point. So we land in this small Tulsa airport. I found the security quite lax for pilots…Dan, you’re going to feel a little pressure now, but you shouldn’t feel pain—if you do, let me know…So we go into this room where there were maps and a screen with flight route and weather information. There was this index with details on every airport in the world! Really incredible stuff…A little pressure again now, Dan…So we’re there basically playing. I mean there’s nothing there we really need. It takes a while for us to notice this guy who’s standing by the door, obviously waiting for us to be done. His uniform was razor sharp, and he had close-cropped hair and a carefully trimmed mustache…Look down, Dan. Good…And he just stood there politely waiting his turn. You know who it was? Obama’s pilot!

“We had no idea the president was coming to that airport. Outside now, there was a big military escort and a motorcade maybe two hundred meters long on the tarmac. It seems the US presidency has several planes. This was a small jet, not the huge Air Force One Boeing 747 that most people think of as the president’s plane…Okay, roll your eyes up now…Good…

Obama - presidential plane 

“Seeing us there with our mouths hanging open, Obama took a minute to say hello. The entire contingent was super polite and amiable, and the following morning, when we went back to pick up our planes and move on, you never would have known that the president of the United States had been there the day before. Not one vestige of his passing remained. I’ll never forget it.”

I said, “I don’t think anything would happen like that now. Obama was a very special president.  And with Trump? Well, they’d probably have had the three of you on the ground with your hands behind your heads.”

“There.” Patricio said, removing the drape from my face. “You’re good to go! Sit up on the edge of the table a minute before you get up. Are you okay?”

“I’m great,” I said.

“So, no more glasses for you except to read. It’s probably a little blurry now, but you can tell, right? You can tell how much better you’re seeing, can’t you?”

“Amazing!” I said. “Thank you, Patricio.”

“Don’t mention it. My assistant will take you back to the dressing room now. Great talking to you, Dan!” he said, as if we’d just had coffee together rather than my having had eye surgery.

After I put my clothes back on, I had to go down a narrow corridor past the ceiling-to-floor glass wall of the operating room to get to the entrance. As I passed, the surgeon, who already had another patient on the table, waved and called out, “Chau, Dan! Talk to you tomorrow.”

Outside, the receptionist scheduled me for a post-op check-up the next day at one. Virginia and I left the clinic and went around the corner to a coffee shop for an express and croissant. I kept my dark glasses on—polarized clip-ons that I’d attached to a frame from which I’d removed the lenses—because my pupil was still dilated and the light flooded in. But already I was amazed at what I could see. I found myself reading my phone without glasses and the details of everything I saw were sharp and clear. When we returned home and I looked at myself in a mirror for the first time, and I was amazed to see that my eye wasn’t even red—the other eye had been red for days after two of my earlier surgeries. In fact, looking at the two eyes together, I’d never have guessed which had been operated on.

Not wanting to strain the eye, I left my phone in my studio and stayed away from my laptop. I had a nap and then began an ever-decreasing routine of eye-drop applications that is to last about three weeks.  But that night I found myself watching TV without specs for the first time since I was twelve. I was amazed at how much light there was in this new world, how much detail, how different colors and textures were. It was like an old-age miracle. No, it was an old-age miracle. A few months before, I’d been worried about whether I could pass the eye exam to renew my driver’s license. Now, I figured, I could pass a pilot’s license exam without glasses.

For twenty-four hours, I simply enjoyed being able to see. To see every detail. To see the tiny leaves on bushes and plants, to see the texture of the cloth of my shirt to see light and color the way I recalled them in my early childhood memories. The world was no longer a toned-down sepia place, but bright surroundings with a varied palette of amazing hues.

After more than six decades of a life in which the first thing I did in the morning was put my glasses on and the last thing I did at night was take them off, it was downright strange not to be wearing glasses. But good strange. By the next day, I was getting accustomed to having twenty-twenty vision and loving it. “Today we’ll go in the truck,” I told my wife, and climbed into the driver’s seat.

Age 12 with my first specs

As soon as I was called into the surgeon’s consulting room, I shook his hand with both of mine and said, “Before anything else, Patricio, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for this gift, this miracle that you’ve given me. I’ve worn glasses since I was twelve and before that, I had a lot of trouble in grade school because no one seemed to realize that I couldn’t see. It wasn’t until I got my first glasses that I saw, for the first time, what chalk actually looked like on a blackboard. So this, for me, is incredible, to be able to see, and see twenty-twenty, without glasses…well, you can’t imagine what it means to me, especially at seventy-something. So, thank you, it’s an invaluable gift.”

He was visibly moved. He checked the eye and pronounced it a total success.

I said, “How soon can I start reading and writing again?”

“Right now!” he said. “Let’s just check to see what prescription you’ll need for your readers.” He did a quick eye exam and gave me a prescription.

“But I want you to be able to work right now, so, you know these throw-away glasses they sell in Walmart or the pharmacy? Get yourself a pair of plus-twos until the optical shop finishes your prescription ones. Those should work just fine for you.”

First grade. That's me, clear at the back, just left
of Miss Long, the teacher. I would get bored, because 
I couldn't read the board or reading charts, so I talked to my
neighbors instead. Miss Long said I was "too talky" and 
seated me as far back as possible. Sitting at the back, I was 
basically blind to anything that went on up front.
Not exactly an auspicious start to grade school. 

He then told me to come back in a week. But then he asked me something else about Ohio, I asked him about Tucumán, then it was politics, then back to aerospace and Neil Armstrong, and just when I was about to leave, he asked how I ever came to live in Argentina…and that’s a long story.

Outside, my wife was getting worried because it was taking so long. She asked one of the staff, who have been in and out of the consulting room a few times since I’d arrived. “Oh, they’re all done with the eye exam,” she said, “they’re just in there chatting.” And gave Virginia a knowing look like, “This could take a while.”

This morning I was thinking, as Rubén Blades sings in Pedro Navaja,
La vida te da sorpresas
Sorpresas te da la vida, ¡ay, Dios!
Or in other words,
Life gives you surprises,
Surprises life gives you, oh Lord!

And you know, some days, you discover it’s not all downhill from here.