Old ladies with studded belts are my peers

If it wasn't enough that I have many signs of old age in physical maladies (carpal tunnel) and disposition (tendency to yell at neighborhood kids for having their music too loud and driving recklessly), I seem to be developing some senility.

Para example: last weekend I was in a used bookstore (teeny aside that is too large for a mid-sentence parenthetical but I don't care: why can't I work in a used bookstore with middle aged ladies with untamed grey hair and studded black belts ala Good Charlotte?) and I was having trouble remembering whether I had read O Pioneers! by Willa Cather.

Once I slid the book out of the heavily populated Cather shelf and looked at the back-cover I remembered it as the story of the inventive sister amongst stagnant bohemian brothers. When pressed I could even recall the vaguest hint of a romantic subplot involving an equally forward-thinking neighbor boy. And though the plot took shape with concentration, I was still floored by my initial indecision. Through my entire academic career (one far more lengthy and arguably more successful than my career-career) I was known for having a good memory for texts. When talking about books I am more likely to name favorite descriptions than to outline actual plots. Don't get me started on my love of re-reading descriptions of milking pans, gin-based alcoholic beverages mixed before 1960, patent leather saddle shoes and medicine cabinets.

All of that nonsense washing around in my brain and I can't remember even remember if I have read a novel!? In a strange desperation I wanted to re-read Oh Pioneers! and also This Side of Paradise, the plot of which beyond prep school fraternities and poetry vaguely alludes me.

I suppose that the difference in my comprehension is logical and the reason two-fold. Primarily I have less time for reading than I once did and so must shove it into lunch hours and the customary time before bed when I have chatted Kevin into stupification/sleep. More than anything I am an endurance reader (less than anything I am an endurance runner). And so these disjointed and episodic reading binges make a novel stick with less cohesiveness than one read in a single, lemonade-y sitting.

Secondly I have been pushing myself to read things that I don't particularly fancy but that I imagine will further my "education." Thus I read Hardy's Far From the Maddening Crowd and Woolf's To the Lighthouse in recent months. I have yet to decide whether these things really further my understanding of anything. Mainly they further a tendency to gloss over descriptions of landscape (a feature that you will notice is consipucously missing from the list of things that I love to read).

So here's to re-reading the classics (term used with ample grain of salt) and never making mental progress.