Trying to Float Read Online Free PDF

fall, you can send her back.”
    Ms. Markowitz wouldn’t budge.
    â€œUnless she is disabled, your daughter is not leaving second grade.”
    The truth is that Ms. Markowitz and I got along, and she always had my best interests at heart. To this day, I am fond of her.
    â€œMyasthenia gravis ! ” my father trumpeted.
    Silence.
    â€œMuscular weakness of the eye,” he translated. “If untreated, there can be damage to the brain, as may be the case here.”
    His family had been in the optical business in Nebraska for many generations, and the Latin names for ocular oddities was the entirety of his inheritance (and mine).
    â€œNow that you mention it,” Ms. Markowitz remarked, “your daughter does not seem to follow the text of the pageas carefully as others, which could . . . just possibly . . . be the result of a weakness in the muscles. I’ve seen it before.”
    My father nodded—the sort of intelligent nodding that accompanied his most idiotic ideas.
    â€œYes,” Ms. Markowitz concluded, “a muscular problem. Possibly acute. Maybe even brain damage. She has always been the odd man out, not really good at anything. And her hand-eye coordination always seemed off.”
    With that, I was allowed to pass into second grade.
    â€”
    Soon after I was diagnosed by Ms. Markowitz, my parents received the news that the school system set certain conditions for my treatment, which, if not met, would cause the handicapped child (me) to repeat the previous grade . . . meaning back to Ms. Markowitz.
    And this is why for an entire year I was forced to spend two hours every day at an experimental eye clinic in midtown Manhattan.
    On the first day, my father and I rode the subway to the clinic. It was on the twentieth floor of a hospital complex. The waiting room was filled with unhappy children and their parents, all of them stewing in the chemical odors from the laboratories next door. Unlike me, though, these kids had scary problems—not pretend ones created by their fathers.
    After an hour, a man in a lab coat opened the door to the waiting room and called my name. I walked slowly toward him.
    I stopped to have a last look at my father as I passed through the door to the laboratories. Given what they were about to do to me, I might never see him again.
    But he was not in his seat. Instead, he had made his way to a shelf against the wall, where he was flipping through a stack of medical magazines. I knew exactly what he was up to: he was expanding his vocabulary of rare eye diseases in anticipation of his next cocktail party.
    The experiments forced upon me that year depended on who did the testing. Each of the doctors had a different theory about how eye problems were cured, and there was competition between them over whose treatment was most effective. I sat in front of screens as different images and words flashed before my eyes. Liquids were sprayed onto my corneas. Every so often the rotating ophthalmologists would get excited and announce a breakthrough. I personally believe that these experiments ruined my eyesight; I started the year with 20/20 vision and came out needing glasses.
    But the eye clinic wasn’t the end of it.
    Once the doctors had assured my school that my nonexistent physical problem had been cured, I still couldn’t read. So from the eye clinic, I was transferred to another program—the GO Project. The GO Project offered free schooling to kids at risk of failing. It was there that I met Nell, a young woman who had been admitted to a graduate program at Harvard and was tutoring until she left for school.
    Hearing that I’d spent a year at an experimental eye cliniccaused such a gush of sympathy in Nell that she agreed to spend whatever time was needed to get me to read. Within seven months, I was reading. The first book I ever read on my own was Jerry Seinfeld’s Halloween, and after that there was no turning