Life at DrTom's: Mostly Humorous Anecdotes by a Mostly Retired Cornell Professor. Thomas A. Gavin
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a cigar or a creme brulee? Forget that I already told you these were descriptions of cigars. Just read them, and then ask yourself what you think they might be describing.
I have been smoking cigars for about eight years now, and I have never tasted any of those flavors. Have I been smoking the wrong cigars? Is my palette not sophisticated enough to detect the flavors that are really there? Am I just too boring or pessimistic a person to see the world the way others do? Do you need to imagine you are sucking on a Hershey's bar while you smoke one of these sticks? Or, should I just pretend that I am Hemingway or Dickens and write a flowery vignette (minus the sex) from a previous century, then send it to Mike's and just tell them, "oh yea, that is my review of a Licenciados 5x50 Wavell". Would anyone know the difference?
So I smoked last night's assignment, took some notes, and thought about the damn thing all night in bed. Most of the time, I felt like I was describing a California Cabernet rather than a rolled up hunk of tobacco leaves that caught fire. But I noticed one very important thing from last evening's experience. With every single puff, I was studying the cigar, thinking about the flavor, examining the ash and the burn of the tobacco, and watching the billowing smoke intently. It was a wonderful, sensuous hour, and the most enjoyable smoke I have had in weeks. It was not the best cigar I have ever smoked, but the experience was extremely memorable. Maybe when you have to concentrate (and I mean focus like a laser) on something you are doing in life that you find pleasurable or important, you enjoy it even more.
This was an epiphany for me. The moral: Take more time to savor every well-prepared meal as if you were going to have to put it to words, every sip of good wine, every beautiful vista, every moment spent with a good friend, every moment spent reading to your child in bed. Maybe if we approached these events in this more "rigorous" way, rather than let them pass almost unnoticed, we would respect life more, need less, and live better.
Sleep talking, the fun I have after dark
I have always been able to find ways to entertain myself. When I was a kid, I collected things: baseball cards, soda bottle caps, coins, stamps. I played baseball, cowboys and Indians, and pretended I was Peter Pan saving Elaine, the cute little girl next door, from something bad.
More recently, with the children grown and gone, I play hide 'n seek with our black lab in the house, kibitz with people I don't know on Facebook, read a couple of books a week, and stroll through the forest around my house as though I were a Cayuga Indian stalking a deer with a bow. I've never actually met a Cayuga Indian, if any still exist, but I pretend that I'm walking stealthily around on dry leaves as I assume they must have done in this very location.
Mostly, I love to tease my wife and play my own brand of games with her, something which she often sees coming, but which she understands is a part of our relationship. For example, she always wants to read in bed at night, and I don't. So before she gets to bed, I often hide her book somewhere in the room, and pretend that I am asleep. But she knows that one too well. "Tom, where did you hide my book? I know you are not asleep." Or, I will unscrew the light bulb in the bedside lamp so that when she tries to turn it on to read---well, you get the picture. Or, when she is ready to go to sleep, she insists that I turn over and face the wall nearest my side of the bed so she can cuddle for a while. But instead of turning 180 degrees to establish the position she wants, I actually turn 360 degrees to end up in exactly the position I was in originally. So, in pitch black dark, I'm excited with anticipation when she discovers that her face is not near the back of my head, but it is actually touching my face. I get giddy just before she lets out a little scream of surprise when she realizes her nose is unexpectedly touching another nose. I love that one.
But on occasion, I also have another opportunity for entertainment because my wife has this interesting ability to talk in her sleep. In the middle of the night, she will utter a perfectly coherent, complete sentence that wakes me from sleep. I awake quickly enough that I hear and understand every word she says. I wish I had written all these down over the years, because by now I would have enough material for a book titled "A Sleep Talker's Guide to the Universe".
It is also obvious that her utterances are a direct manifestation of what she is dreaming or thinking about. Last week, our 2-year old grandson had tubes put in his ears to reduce the incidence of ear infections to which he is prone. Two nights ago, Management spouted off the following sentence: "There should be a shine off the tympanic membrane." Realize that my wife used to be a Registered Nurse, so she must have been dreaming about ear anatomy and its characteristics, although I don't know if the tympanum ever shines.
But the best utterance was years ago when my wife still worked as a R.N. in the Emergency Department at the local hospital. She was always bringing the stories of her work home with her---the amputated arm of the day, the broken bone protruding through the leg, and the usual heart attacks, kidney failures, and drug overdoses. After 20 years of that, I felt I had learned so much about the medical profession that I almost went into private practice to treat trauma patients. Follow that up with watching the tv series ER for about five years, and I could have taught medicine at a university. One night while we were sleeping, the sleep talker went into action. "Give him .5 of epi (meaning 0.5cc of epinephrine), STAT!", I heard her say with obvious panic in her voice. This time, I thought I would try to talk back to her to see if she registered my response. So I said, "No, make that 10cc of epinephrine, STAT!". She definitely heard me. She became immediately agitated, started moving her arms and legs like she was trying to stop the lethal injection about to be given by this new doc in the ER who looked a little like her husband, and she repeatedly said "No. No." It was great.
I realized then that I had unleashed the power. So for many years since then, when my wife starts her monologue, I whisper into her ear something like "Cheese omelette with mushrooms", and the next morning she asks me if I would like an omelette for breakfast. "Oh sure, that sounds nice", I say naively. Or, "A Porter-Cable rotating sander for my birthday". When she presents me with my birthday gift a week later, I act totally surprised. "Wow, I've been wanting one of these." And, "You probably have as great a husband as anyone you know." For the next couple of days she keeps telling me how lucky she is to have a guy like me, and that I'm so special, although she can not remember exactly why.
Last night when we went to bed, she announced that she was going to read before turning off the light. And then, "Tom, did you hide my glasses?" Of course I did. That was entertaining, but the real fun begins AFTER she goes to sleep.
Bioprospecting in your own backyard
Picture this scene for a moment from 500 years ago, somewhere in Ethiopia or Arabia. A man picks some ripe fruit from a plant we now call the coffee tree. Inside the reddish fruit are two seeds embedded in a gelatinous material with the consistency of an 8-year old's snot in January, although it is somewhat sweet. He removes the seeds, somehow dissolves the snotty material that coats each seed, dries the seeds, roasts them over a fire, grinds them up, pours hot water over them, and drinks the beverage so created. Are you kidding me? Although used originally only in religious ceremonies, coffee is one of the most popular drinks in the world today, with over 100 million people dependent on coffee for their livelihoods.
Or picture this from about 2,000 years ago. Some Native Americans, and the early Greeks as well, happened to suck on the leaf of a willow tree at the time they had a headache or a fever and found that their symptoms improved. Later, the bark was soaked in water and the solution used as a medicinal. It turns out that willows contain a chemical we now call aspirin. Aspirin, which is produced commercially these days, is probably the oldest and most widely used medicine by humans. What are the odds?
Now, I don't know what the trial and error process was for these early discoverers of coffee and aspirin, or for maple syrup, bee honey, silkworm silk for clothing, tobacco for smoking, or any of thousands of other such examples. The facts are clear: humans have been exploring and investigating the fauna and flora in their environment for a very long time, resulting in many useful products that we take for granted today. This continues today in a highly technological milieu in an endeavor called "bioprospecting". But to the ancients, there was a logic to many of these discoveries. For example, willows are found in low lying wet or damp areas, which is also where the fever or "ague"