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are oddly fuzzy. At first you fear some sort of creeping fungus, but then you tip your head back a tad and they come into clear focus and somewhere inside your internal you says, “Uh-oh.”
    A guy could go on, I suppose, about what a spiritual gully-washer this moment is, how those fuzzy fingernails represent the fraying of time and the very fading of life itself, but let’s not get heavy; it’s not like your liver dropped out on the sidewalk. Fact is, this is the sort of thing you can—pardon the pun—see coming. Plus, how many other mileage-based maladies can be cured for under three dollars, which is the upper-end price range for your low-end reading glasses, or, as we call them in our family: cheaters.
    I gently informed my brother that his mortal depreciation will now be measured in increments of magnification. Based on my experience, I told him to start with the 1.25s but to keep a pair or two of 2.0s on hand for close-range detail work. Buy cheapo cheaters in bulk, I told him, and just sling ’em everywhere. I sow them to the six directions: my desk, the car, the bedside stand, the workbench down in the pole barn, the tackle box, the pockets of my hunting jackets and suitcases, beside the bathroom sink, and inside the little glove box on the tractor. Had I the funds and resources, I would hire a crop duster to scatter them over the farm in general.
    A year ago our local rescue service was paged in the wee hours to help an elderly lady who was having cardiac symptoms. I was the first on scene. She was frightened and trembling as I took her vital signs. As I let the air out of the blood-pressure cuff and turned to read the dial, I suddenly realized that no matter how I squinted or tipped my head back, I couldn’t see the number. It was the first time I realized my eyes could be a liability for someone else. After the woman was safely in the hands of paramedics and I returned home, the first thing I did was place two pair of reading glasses in my rescue kit. I have given my brother (we took our EMT training together twenty-five years ago) the same advice.
    Mostly, though, I tell him about the good stuff. Like how the first time you peer over those lenses at some younger person, you feel suddenly wiser and summarily excused from all subsequent fashion trends. Or the joyful bonus of reaching up for your glasses to find not one but two pair on your head. And what an economical miracle it is, after squinting and scowling in a stubborn attempt to read the aspirin bottle, to pop on a pair of cheaters and find yourself glory-be hallelujah cured of your weak-eyed affliction. What a fabulous soul-shiner to rediscover words and letters that don’t look as if they’ve been rolled in lint. Embrace the change, I told my brother, but only after donning your cheaters, so you don’t accidentally hug the drill press.
GOZZLED
    The other day my brother called to happily inform me that a grinding wheel he was using had exploded, with some of the shrapnel lacerating his neck not very far from several life-critical circulation points. Actually, what he said was, “Yah, it got me right in the gozzle.” It turns out this was one of those cases where a quarter-inch or so either way made all the difference between a goofball phone conversation and a memorial service. But John wasn’t shook up about it. In fact, we talked about that: about how when the universe decides to flick your ear instead of take your head off, the thing to do is to stop, direct your attention toward the powers that may be, nod your head and say, “So noted,” and then get back to ’er. Or as my brother-in-law Mark would say, “Walk it off.”
    â€œWalk it off” is Mark’s answer to pretty much everything. Hit your head on the truck hood? Walk it off. Burn your hand on a piece of welding? Walk it off. Wife ran off with the Schwan’s man? Walk it off.
    Where I come from there is a whole